The Founding as Ideology

Abstract The “Founding” is a keyword in the United States’ constitutional vocabulary. Across popular politics, public law, and civic culture, it signifies a closed moment of constitutional creation—and often much more. Invocations commonly involve vague yet powerful significations about constitutional authority, memory, and meaning-making. Particularly as “originalist” judicial and academic writing leans on these submerged qualities, it is worth asking: what is the Founding? This Article proposes a conceptual answer in historical context. Through a close study of contours of antebellum constitutionalism, it argues for understanding the Founding as an ideology that committed Americans to venerate and defer to an authoritative, originary constitutional era. Forged as citizens grappled with the politics of slavery, the Founding structured language and perception, motivated action and inaction, and delimited boundaries of political possibility. This Article studies two essential sites of inculcation apart from formal power—civic ceremonies and educational practices—to sketch the structure of the constitutional Founding as ideology. Then, it outlines how that ideology authorized constitutional actions of voting, legislating, judging, protesting, and seceding. In conclusion, the Article suggests that its analysis models a broader framework for interpreting the diffuse materials of constitutional life across periodizations of constitutional history. Approaching the Founding as ideology can allow scholars to better see how its relative authority over time and the purposes to which it has been directed have shaped American constitutional experience.